Matthias Worch
Matthias Worch is a level designer who worked at Legend Entertainment. __TOC__ Bio Matthias started making games around the age of 8. His father booked himself into a BASIC course, and he taught himself programming from the photocopied notes that his father brought home. A couple of years later, he graduated to 6502 Assembler. He graduated from High School in 1995, been deemed unfit for (in Germany mandatory) military service because of a broken knee, and enrolled at the University of Essen right after high school to study English and Biology in a teaching capacity. However, he eventually found out this wasn't his forte. His real passion, however, turned out to be the building of interactive 3D worlds, using the 3D Construction Kit on the Amiga to build his first 3D gameplay spaces, and later became a prominent level designer in the Doom and Quake modding communities, hanging out in the #quakeed and #level_design channels and creating the critically acclaimed mission packs "Beyond Belief" for the first Quake, , which he revisited in 2008. As the Dallas gaming scene exploded in 1997, with companies like Ion Storm, Ritual and Rebel Boat Rocker popping up (Seattle would soon offer additional options through Valve, Monolith and Cavedog), he saw many of his IRC editing friends getting offered jobs as professional level designers. Of course, he would be part of that boom, so in 1998, he moved there in order to work as a designer at Ritual Entertainment on the videogame SiN. Getting the job wasn't the worst part, as he was a natural fit, but the immigration problems were. After the game was completed, he left Ritual because he didn't liked the direction the company was following. He then moved on to Legend Entertainment, in order to work on games such as Wheel of Time , Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali and Unreal II: The Awakening. RTNP in particular lended him his first bonus check. However, due to issues during development (especially with the TCA Atlantis intermission segments, which, according to him, felt disconnected from the rest of the game), he doesn't have particularly fond memories of the game. He left Legend shortly after the game was released, though scrapped material from his levels eventually made it into several XMP levels. Afterwards, he worked on several games such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3 – Rebel Strike and Lair ; Visceral Games' Dead Space 2 , 2K Games' Mafia III and the cancelled Star Wars 1313 before being hired by Epic Games in order to work as a design lead on the special projects group. Aside of his work, he also gave speeches at the GDC and International Game Developers Association. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Victoria, three kids, three hamsters, six triops, five tadpoles, three salamanders, one fish and one parakeet. Works Official Unofficial * Unreal II: The Awakening: Solaris Base Trivia * M. Worch, the pilot of UMS Chantilly that appears in Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali was named after him. External links and references See also